GURPS vehicles??

[dalej we]

will the GURPS vehicles book be brought up to 4ed??

if this was posted to the wrong group, please feel free to re-post to the appropriate group. ty in advance
Dee Jay

[Ulzgoroth]

Not exactly.

There is a GURPS Vehicle Design System (that's the title last I remember) under development for GURPS 4e that's supposed to fill the same niche as GURPS Vehicles for 3e. Some of us are very much looking forward to it whenever it finally appears...

[Flyndaran]

"Someday", is about the best answer anyone can give at this time. It's been "in the works" for many years. It's not dead. It has not been abandoned.
It just gets put on the back burner for more time sensitive projects, I believe. And it's apparently such a complex internally cross-linked book that it's not very amenable to partial focus work.
(Not affiliated with SJG in any way. This is just what I've gathered from posts and announcements. I also have a very poor memory, so take this post with a grain of salt.)

[Varyon]

In the meantime, there is the Spaceships series, which as the name implies allows you to design spacecraft. Later supplements allow for more aircraft - better support for jet engines and the like, ornithopter wings, helicopter blades, etc - and there are some Pyramid articles that allow you to use the system to create ground (wheel, tracked, or flexibody) and water (propellors, oars, and/or sails) craft, or even stationary buildings, but nowhere near as in depth as the old Vehicles book.

[Flyndaran]

Spaceships has an entire supplement dedicated to the very weird. Quite a few forms of propulsion, real and fictional, that most probably could never have imagined.

[Bruno]

Folks have even used the Spaceships rules (including the expansion in Pyramid) to design buildings. It's not the same neurotic* level of detail as GURPS VEHICLES for 3e, but it's pretty good.

* I say this as someone who carried GURPS Vehicles and GURPS Robots around in school like a talisman, and who owns the GURPS Vehicles designer software. I love that system. I built "normal PCs" using it. But it's crazy complex.

[Flyndaran]

Spaceships if far more modular compared to the self-referential Vehicles. That's good and bad, but much quicker regardless of how one looks at it all.

(I'm not sure self-referential is the right word for where if you change one aspect, it has a cascade effect on numerous other characteristics.)

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by Bruno

* I say this as someone who carried GURPS Vehicles and GURPS Robots around in school like a talisman, and who owns the GURPS Vehicles designer software. I love that system. I built "normal PCs" using it. But it's crazy complex.

I don´t carry them around in paper form, but they are on my notebook (which I do carry around), I have a set in the office, and a set plus two back up sets at home. And no, it´s not very complex. There are pocket calculators after all. Or pen and paper. The math required is maybe 5th or 6th grade at worst. But anyway, greetings from a fellow fan.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

The math required is maybe 5th or 6th grade at worst.

The math isn't advanced! Never said it was, unlike the bashers.

But there's a lot of steps. There's a lot of moving parts, even if none of the parts are particularly fancy. A watch isn't made out of particularly complicated pieces, but the whole watch is pretty complicated.

Getting to near the end of a build and discovering your vehicle is too heavy to get the performance you want, and now you have to go back and change one thing that cascades through all the steps again... blech. I live and breathe spreadsheets and automation in general so it's much less of an issue personally. But if I have to prototype an application in excel to create a thing, it's definitely complex.

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by Bruno

But if I have to prototype an application in excel to create a thing, it's definitely complex.

Maybe, but I never needed excel. I use pen and paper, record every step, and if necessary go back to change something. I also combine steps: for example I calculate weight and cost for all intended surface features together, so if I have to make the wings larger, I have to change weight and cost only once and not for every surface feature seperately.